If you want someone to achieve a goal, you should give them a head start – even if that head start is really just an illusion. Loyalty programs are based on the idea that consumers are more likely to repeat purchase if they are given incentives to reach specific goals with well-defined rewards. A classic…

The shelter-in-place / stay-at-home orders have triggered new words and phrases in our collective vocabularies. Some of them existed before but have become more commonly used: coronavirus, pandemic, and virtual happy hour. But others are newly created to describe our COVID-19 mandated world. They are descriptive portmanteaus which aren’t likely to stay in our vocabularies…

For many years, my routine was a Sunday hike followed by a Sunday blog. For a variety of reasons, both my hiking and blogging have become erratic. After skipping yet another Sunday hike, I was surprised to find that I still had exceeded 10,000 steps per day for the past week. 10,000 is the number…

If you’ve listened to a talk from a tech company over the last few years, you’ve almost certainly heard someone proclaim that data is the new oil. The phrase is widely attributed to British mathematician Clive Humby way back in 2006 who explained: Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot…

It’s been a little more than a week since (mostly) everyone in Silicon Valley started sheltering in place and, surprisingly (to me, at least), I haven’t made a dent in my antilibrary. Truth be told, I’ve only read about 100 pages of a single book during that time. Part of the reason is that I’ve…

With more than 114M viewers, Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 was the most-watched broadcast in the U.S. according to Nielsen ratings. The next four Super Bowls had declining ratings, with 2019’s Super Bowl XLII yielding only 98M viewers – the lowest since 2009. The overnight ratings for this year’s Super Bowl suggest the trend was…

It’s the time of year when New Year’s resolutions are ubiquitous. In a quick search, I found more than 100 articles published in the last week alone. Apparently, we’ve all resolved to write about resolutions. While they are common, New Year’s resolutions are notoriously difficult to keep – only 1/3 of people who make resolutions keep them…

I’m a big proponent of using scorecards to monitor progress to well-defined objectives. Earlier in my career, I ran a software company that used scorecards to help dozens of companies around the world ensure their execution was in line with their strategy. When using scorecards, I’ve cautioned that unless you compare yourself against an external…

Charles Darwin is well-known for his contributions to the science of evolution and has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history. But he certainly wasn’t infallible. Darwin claimed the effects of natural selection took hundreds of years. As he wrote in On the Origin of Species, “We see nothing of…

For more than 20 years, I’ve been playing the song Dead Man’s Party by Oingo Boingo repeatedly on Halloween. My tradition started in 1996, a year after Oingo Boingo last played the song at their farewell concert on Halloween 1995. I’ve been doing this for so long that the song has become synonymous with Halloween…